Friday, March 1, 2013

Movie Review: Jack The Giant Slayer

Hollywood needs to stop handing
out budgets of $200 million to people like it is pocket money, because it is
not, and 99 percent of these humongous budget movies fail to do what is
expected of them – entertain. It is harder to please audiences nowadays, but in
this day and age, no one wants to pay a premium to watch a terribly scripted tech
demo of colossal visual effects.

Jack The Giant Slayer is a mess from start to finish. The romance
is painfully clichéd, the adventure is dull and the only thing Giant in the
film is its budget. As the film goes on it becomes increasingly shocking to
assimilate the fact that the writer-director team of Christopher McQuarrie and
Bryan Singer who made The Usual Suspects have
been responsible for the muddle on screen. Singer seems like a two hit wonder
thanks to the horrid Superman Returns and
the even worse Valkyrie that preceded
this film and it is not hard to figure out why he has decided to direct the
next X-Men installment next. In Jack the Giant Slayer Singer comes
dangerously close to demonstrating that the genius behind Keyser Soze’s story
was a fluke. Not only does he fail to create a fresh or likable bunch of
central characters but he also fails to create a sense of adventure despite the
$200 million CGI entrusted to him.

The film tries to be a radical adult
version of the ‘Jack and the beanstalk’, here we have a young man (a miscast Nicholas
Hoult) as a farm boy who falls for the princess (Eleanor Tomlinson) and
inadvertently chances upon a bunch of fabled magic beans. Upon contact with
water the beans sprout into a giant tree that connects the kingdom to the land
of the villainous giants. One thing leads to another and Jack sets off with the
king’s elite guard to rescue the princess – a plot that seemed stale even when
Super Mario Bros came out. Like Snow
White and the Huntsman last year, the film falsely promises to offer a
twisted and unique take on a beloved children’s property. What it does offer is
a dreadfully written villain (played by Stanley Tucci) whose backstory and intentions
were either left on the cutting room floor or were never scripted to begin
with.

The giants are incredibly
detailed, each one of them has a distinct character – Fee, Fi, Fo and Fum are given
some serious screentime and even some character dynamics which is a nice touch.
The giants are also quite disgusting, some dig their noses and then taste their
fingers – something kids will enjoy giggling over. The humans are quite
terribly sketched though, each given worse dialogue and motives than the next. Seeing
as the film fails completely in story and character, one expects to at least
see a decent CGI demo. The special effects are great and expensive looking no
doubt, but not something you have never seen in cinema before. The characters
stare at the imagery as if there is something epic going on but you never once
share their sentiment, and the 3D feels as tacked on as ever. The action and big finale are downright boring and everyone
involved in the film seems constantly confused about its target audience. Hopefully
Singer’s X-Men reunion won’t
disappoint as well.